'Hood' by Stephen R Lawhead

I've just finished reading 'Hood' by Stephen R. Lawhead.

It was, erm, kind of OK.

I have had mixed experiences with Lawhead books. I loved the original Pendragon trilogy, loved 'The Paradise War', liked 'The Silver Hand', thought the resolution of the trilogy in 'The Endless Knot' was a bit 'meh', was really, really, really disappointed by 'Byzantium'. Thought the later two Pendragon books were quite good, and so on.

He is certainly a gifted story teller. Occasionally he is a great story writer.

In Hood we have great story telling. Shame the plot is sooooo slow. Nothing happens for chapters at a time. Indeed, the thing that I had expected to happen by about a third of the way into the book, only really happens at the end of the book. Or, in other words, this book is pure introduction from beginning to end. It is basically the setup for the rest of the trilogy or series or whatever it is. Luckily I have parts 2 and 3 sitting on my shelf, but a book that is all intro is irritating.

I will read the next one, but I have other things to read first.

Currently reading 'Under Heaven' by Guy Gavriel Kay. Which is great so far, but I'm only a few chapters in...

Butter?

I had a baked potato at lunchtime.

I have noticed that both of the food outlets near my work which sell baked potatoes make the same mistake.

They always ask "do you want butter on it?" to which I always reply "yes".

They then, invariably, put margarine on the potato. Not butter.

Are there people out there who really don't know the difference between the two? Do thay all work in baked potato shops? Why, oh, why?

Man flu

I have man flu. OK, so its really just a cold, but 'man flu' sounds so much more entertaining.

Here are my top tips for how to fight 'man flu':

1. Don't use those 'cold & flu' combined pain relief and decongestant remedies like Lemsip (well, don't use them during the day, a Lemsip at night is OK). Because what happens is one out of the pain relief or the decongestant runs out of effectiveness before the other and you end up having to wait a few hours before you can have another.
2. Contac. I don't know if the rest of the world has this, but in the UK, these are the best. Slow release capsules of pseudoephadrine hydrochloride. Basically, its a decongestant that actually works for about 10 hours. Take one when you wake up and another about 10 or 11 hours later.
3. Pain killers. Ibuprofen works best for me. Take as often as you're allowed to.
4. Zinc. Someone told me about this a few years back and I was sceptical, but it seems to actually work. As soon as you feel the onset of a cold, start taking Zinc supplements. This boosts your immune system. It doesn't diminish the symptoms of a cold, but it does (appear to) shorten the duration of a cold. Since I've been taking Zinc during colds, I can only remember one cold that was bad for more than two days (sure, there's a few days of sniffling after that, but only two days of blocked noses and aches).
5. Eat chili and drink orange juice. Just because.

The way it should be is not the way it is...

Why isn't life simple?

• When I was a young teenager, my local radio station played the music I wanted to hear and a local department store sold the kind of clothes I wanted (my Mum) to buy (for me).
• When I was an older teenager, BBC Radio 1 played the music I wanted to hear and Top Man sold the clothes I wanted to buy.
• As an undergrad student, there wasn't really a radio station that played what I wanted to hear and clothes came from Burtons.
• As a postgrad student, Virgin radio played the music I wanted to hear and River Island was the shop of choice.
• As a late 20 something, Virgin continued to play the music I wanted to hear, but I found myself shopping in Next for clothes.
• In my early 30s I found myself listening to BBC Radio 2 (during the day, never in the evenings) and clothes seemed to come from Gap or Next.
• Now in my late 30s, I find myself listening to Planet Rock or 96.3 Rock Radio (thanks to a DAB radio) and clothes seem to come mostly from Gap or Fat Face.

Why couldn't things like radio stations and clothes shops just make life easy for us? Why don't they just age with us? Every 5 years or so, the BBC should invent a new radio station which should age along with its listeners. And a new clothes chain should appear, targeting one age group and then aging with that age group. It would be a much better system.

You see, as I approach the transition from thirtysomething into fortysomething (not for another couple of years, mind) I find myself wondering where I'll be buying clothes from and what I'll be listening to in a few years time...

Scientifically proven fact!

It is a scientifically proven fact that whenever someone uses the phrase "scientifically proven fact" what they really mean is 'I heard someone say this and I believed them, but I haven't put in the time and effort to find any references for it' or possibly 'I read it on wikipedia'.

It is self-evident that when someone uses the phrase "it is self-evident" what they really mean is 'this is my interpretation of the facts and if you come to different conclusions then you are wrong'.

And 99% of statistics that claim that "99%" of some group are united on an issue are completely made up.

I've heard two of these abused in the past 24 hours and it can't be long before someone uses the third...

Spoiler sport...

Why did nobody tell me that Saturday evening's Doctor Who was the first part of a two parter? I like to know these things in advance. Now I have another four and a bit days to wait for the conclusion. I wasn't mentally prepared for this. And add to that that this is the best episode of the series so far, which only serves to increase the annoyance. Aaaaargh.

Full review to follow once I've seen the conclusion.

Fotobook gripe

I've been compiling a photo album of all the best of my digi-photos from 2007. I decided to use the Fotobook software to create the book (can be done offline, unlike Photobox who I have used before), which you then upload to their website and they print the book and post it to you.

The book hasn't arrived yet. I'll comment on the photo quality when it does.

But I am annoyed by their software. It ate all the free space on my hard disk. Before I started working on the book, there was 19Gb of free space on my 'C' drive. I saved the file to the desktop. As I added photos (about 280 of them) the thing grew to a whopping 1.8Gb. But still nowhere near enough to clog up the hard drive.

Last weekend, while saving a near-final version of the book, the computer gave me a 'stream writing error' warning. I had a look and discovered that the hard drive was full! A bit of snooping lead me to the discovery of over ten '.tmp' files, each well over 1Gb in size, buried away in a temp directory. The Fotobook software doesn't delete its temp files! And everytime you use it it creates a new file rather than over-writing a previous one.

That is really sloppy.

Dhabba: A highly disappointing Indian restaurant in Glasgow

We went out to Dhabba - an award winning 'Authentic North Indian' restaurant in Glasgow city centre - for my brother-in-law's 30th birthday on Saturday.

If that's the authentic thing, I'll take the Anglicised version any day of the week!

It was all style over content - a very nice looking place, well laid out, very classy. But with totally non-remarkable food and offensive waiters.

• The food was over priced
• There wasn't much choice
• Only a few starters, all very similar
• The staff were exceedingly reluctant to serve tap water (indeed, when asked for some later in the evening, one waiter brought only a single glass, thumped it down on the table and said 'tap water - its free!' in a very grumpy tone)
• One waiter got very, very annoyed with us when 3 people (on a table of 13) changed seats between the starter and the main course
• The same waiter also got very grumpy when we wanted to order our own starters, rather than having them bring a selection of starters to share
• They clearly interpret the word 'tandoori' to mean 'burnt'
  
• And the list went on...

The most notable thing was that at the end of the evening, not one of the people on the table commented on how nice the food was.

It was adequate food, over priced, with bad service. Not just poor service, but bad service.

Rant over. Thank you for listening.

Health & Safety nonsense

We took the kids to the 'Christmas Wonderland' in Edinburgh this morning. One of the things that our elder daughter was looking forward to was getting candy floss. So after a ride on the carousel we approached the man who was making balls of candyfloss and putting them in bags...

"Two sticks of candyfloss please"

"Sorry, I can't sell you candyfloss on sticks anymore, only in bags. For health & safety reasons. I've been doing this for 21 years and have never known anyone to hurt themselves with a stick... but that's the new rules"

Traffic jammed

I had a meeting to go to in Glasgow last night. I and my colleague Guillermo set out from work at just after 5pm, reaching the Edinburgh City Bypass (A720) at Straiton Junction just about 5.30pm. The meeting was a stone's throw from M8 Junction 16 and, even at that time of night, shouldn't have taken more than about an hour to get to.

It was slow on the bypass, but within about 15 minutes we were onto the M8. Here we hit the first queue. I know it often queues between Hermiston Gait and Junction 2 at that time of night, so I wasn't too bothered. However, the queue extended the whole way to Livingston at Junction 3. So we passed Livingston at about 6:15pm, knowing we'd be a bit late for the meeting, but not that concerned. Then we hit what turned out to be the big queue. From Junction 3A to the middle of the roadworks after Junction 5 (about 10 miles) took about an hour. My new car can tell you all sorts of information about your journey - as we passed Harthill I noticed that my average speed for the whole journey was only 17mph. At Kirk O' Shotts the traffic flow stopped altogether. For half an hour. Average speed for the trip reduced to 13mph.

About 10 cars ahead of us, two 'motorway maintenance' trucks blocked the road. It turned out they had been repairing a hole in the carriageway which had (obviously) been slowing the traffic down for hours. So, at ten to eight, we emerged from the queue onto a totally clear road, but there was no point in continuing to the meeting. We were still 25 minutes away from the venue and there was only about half an hour of meeting left. So we went home.

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And as if that wasn't enough, my digibox failed to record Heroes on BBC3 last night (or rather it mysteriously stopped recording about 10 minutes into it), so I've a whole week to wait for the next episode. Bah!

Called by the fuzz

On Thursday I bought a new (to me) car. I traded in my old Mondeo as part exchange. Last night (Friday) I went to bed early. About an hour and a half into my sleep I was rudely awakened by a noise which I couldn't quite figure out what it was. I listened for a bit before I realised that it was actually the phone. I must have been in a deep sleep. It rung off before I got there, but started ringing again before I got back to bed.

"Good evening sorry to call you so late is that Dr Carvel and are you the registered keeper of X-ray 7-9-8 Romeo Sierra Sierra?" came the punctuationless stream of words down the phone.

"Erm, huh?"

"X-ray 7-9-8 Romeo Sierra Sierra?"

"Yes, that was my car. I traded it in on Thursday..."

And so on. It turned out that this was the police and that my car had been stolen. My old car, that is. Which had probably been sitting out the back of a garage in central Edinburgh, probably with the keys in the ignition. The police had pulled the car over and - for some reason - were suspicious that the driver was not the owner. But did they really have to call me after midnight to find out if I was the owner?

So I went back to bed. And lay awake worrying, quite irrationally, that my new car was somehow more at risk of being stolen... Thankfully its still there this morning.

Panic!

I am frantically backing everything on my computer up in a state of panic. I logged into my (work) laptop (while at home) a wee while ago using all the usual settings and everything was different to normal. When I did CTRL-ALT-DEL it said "J Mike Davidson is logged in as rcarvel" which worried me. I hastily logged out and logged back in again. Same again. So I logged out and am now logged in as a different user. And am backing everything up to an external disc just in case.

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It turned out that "J Mike Davidson" was an old member of our IT team and I had managed to log in or out of the system at precisely the wrong time, during an update, and my computer had got a garbled file as a result. Or something. Everything actually works fine now. And I am assured that I wasn't hacked. Whew!

On hold...

Currently on hold to an insurance company.

So far they have played Level 42, Dido and Kool and the gang at me. I'm sure these songs have been specially selected to maximise the likelihood of me giving up and hanging up the phone... but I'm persevering!

[time passes]

Just had The Feeling, which was nice, but we're now on Dire Straits.

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Back on hold to the same folk a few days later. They're playing the truly awful 'Life' by Desree at me now. Aaaaaaaaargh!

And now we're back to Level 42. Where there's weeping and gnashing of teeth...

Spring forward, fall back

You know, I really used to appreciate the extra hour in bed on the last Saturday of October as we switched from British Summer Time back to Grenwich Mean Time.

Now I have kids. Instead of gaining an extra hour in bed, the October clock change now means that I am woken an hour earlier in the morning than I would like to be. The clock read 5:07 when I was woken this morning...

Nowadays, I prefer the clock change in the Springtime - for a few days after that the kids sleep in in the morning, so it is then that I get the extra hour in bed.

Shoot the dog!

I like dogs. Man's best friend and all that. I have never actually owned a dog but have got on well with dogs of friends, relations and neighbours. I wouldn't generally advocate any kind of cruelty to dogs. Generally.

Our neighbour has a new dog. She (the neighbour) is generally out in the evenings. The dog is home alone. Barking. Yapping. Growling. Occasionally whining. But generally making some annoying noise for more than two hours a night. Usually when we're trying to get to sleep. Aaaaaargh!

Its just gone quiet, but I know it'll be barking again in a few minutes. Somebody please do something about that dog!